After clearing waivers, Frank Thomas signed a one-year contract with the Oakland Athletics. We reported soon after Thomas was released by the Toronto Blue Jays that the Athletics had interest in the Big Hurt and the pairing became official on Thursday.
Thomas and the A’s wasted no time, as Thomas was in the lineup for the A’s on Thursday. Oakland responded positively, beating the Minnesota Twins 11-2. Thomas batted cleanup and had two walks and a run scored.
While Thomas is batting just .159 on the season, the A’s are confident that the 39-year-old will be able …read more

Frank Thomas wasn’t pleased with a decrease in at bats and the Toronto Blue Jays were tired of waiting for his bat to come around. The two sides seemingly got what they wanted when the Blue Jays cut Thomas.
On the season, Thomas was batting .167 with three homers and 11 RBI for Toronto. The 39-year-old Thomas had started slowly the last few years before turning it up as the season went along. Toronto didn’t want to see if history would repeat itself and instead let him go.
The Blue Jays will likely rotate a number of players at …read more

While I’m waiting for Puppy Bowl IV to arrive, I thought I’d flip through the STATS 1997 Baseball Scoreboard for inspiration. I’ve already used this source to re-examine Barry Bonds and now I see that there are a few more projections in here.
This time we’re looking at projected career hits. Specifically we’re looking at the players who were judged at that time most likely to reach 3000 hits. Let’s compare projected with actual, shall we?

Career Hits, Projected pre-’97 vs Actual post-’07

Player
Proj
Act
Diff

Cal Ripken Jr.
3166
3184
+18

Tony Gwynn
3139
3141
+2

Wade Boggs
3025
3010
-15

Roberto Alomar
2803
2724
-79

Rafael Palmeiro
2672
3020
+348

Chuck Knoblauch
2509
1839
-670

Frank Thomas
2355
2409
+54

Marquis Grissom
2328
2251
-77

Alex Rodriguez
2151
2250
+99

Points worth noting:

Those projections for Ripken, Gwynn, and Boggs are …read more